Impacts of climate change on agriculture: What, when, where and how?
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Date
2015
Authors
Tumbo, Siza
Sanga, C
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Abstract
One of the key messages emerging out of the recent IPCC reports is that
the climate change is real, happening and will continue to happen for
the foreseeable future. The report also estimates with high confidence
that the negative impacts on agriculture outweigh the positives which
makes adaptation an urgent and pressing challenge. However,
adaptation planning requires accurate information about where, when
and how the impacts are going to be felt and who will be more
vulnerable. Eastern Africa is considered as one of the most vulnerable
regions in the world due to its high dependence on agriculture for
subsistence, employment and income. Generally the region experiences
prolonged and highly destructive droughts covering large areas at least
once every decade and more localized events more frequently. The
negative impacts of climate are not limited to the years with extreme
climatic conditions. Even with normal rainfall, the countries in the
region do not produce enough food to meet their needs. Overlaid on
this challenging scenario is the dominance of semi-arid to arid climatic
conditions which are marginal for crop production, degraded soils,
extreme poverty and lack of infrastructure which make the countries in
the region highly vulnerable to current and future changes in climate.
There is a rapidly growing literature on vulnerability and adaptation to
increased climatic variability and change but most of these assessments
are based on statistical and empirical models that fail to account the full
range of complex interactions and their effects on agricultural systems.
For developing and implementing adaptation programs, more detailed
information about how the components of the prevailing farming
system such as which crops and varieties are more vulnerable and
which management practices are unviable under the predicted climates
is needed. However, several problems such as non-availability of
downscaled local level climate change projections, lack of information
on how the projected changes impact agricultural systems and scarcity
of information on how these changes on production and productivity of
agriculture translate into economic impacts including food security at
household and national levels are constraining such an assessment.
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Keywords
Climate change, climate vulnerability, agriculture, agriculture systems, East Africa, Tanzania, Kenya